You’re looking for a sales superstar to join your organisation. How do you go about finding the right person?

You might take the route of job adverts on the usual job sites, and you’ll probably get a great response but how many of those applications are of real interest to you and your company?

The biggest problem with recruitment is only targeting active candidates. You can’t sit back and relax after posting a job post and expect the perfect candidate to come waltzing into your company. The chances are most sales superstars will be excelling in their current positions, taking home anything between £200,000 – £1m so they’re unlikely to be looking for a new position because they’re doing so well. So how can you go about targeting these people and interesting them in joining your company?

To fix the problem of only targeting active candidates you need to take the right steps towards headhunting and targeting passive candidates – the people who aren’t actively looking for new opportunities but may be open to them when an opportunity is presented to them.

How do you do this?

Headhunting and executive search can’t be done effectively by someone with no experience. To effectively target passive candidates, it needs to be done by the right people with the right skills and experience to effectively sell the opportunity to people who aren’t openly looking for new opportunities.

Take a look at the master recruiter competency model

To have quality driven recruitment with high satisfaction you must have outbound recruitment as part of your strategy. It takes a great amount of research, dedication and skill to be able to target the right people and qualify them from anywhere in the world, however it’s just as important to choose the right recruiter for your organisation so you have the right people to target the right talent for your company. Our advice is to choose a recruiter who specialises in your sector so they have the right network and experience to get the right people on board for your company.

If you’re going to invest in an executive search firm read our downloadable guide: Sourcing candidates – which will give you advice on how to choose the right method to get the best from your recruitment plan.